Tim Benz: MLB preparing to cancel games soon — is that a threat or a promise?

According to ESPN.com, Major League Baseball will begin canceling regular-season games if the league and its players’ association can’t reach a new collective bargaining agreement by Monday. The games would not be rescheduled.

Well, don’t threaten me with a good time.

My first thought when I read that was, “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Obviously, the best course of action for the health of the game would be for MLB and its players’ union to reach an agreement that has a manageable salary cap and a flexible salary floor that is a representative percentage of each team’s revenue.

Obviously, the best course of action for my personal health would be to get more exercise, quit drinking alcohol, cut back to a maximum of six cups of coffee per day and enjoy at least six hours of sleep at least once during the week.

Yeah. None of that is happening either.

A substantive change in baseball won’t happen without MLB getting shut down and staring a true crisis in the face as the NHL did in 2004-05.

It stunk having a year without hockey. However, the sport went away and came back in a much better position.

Perfect? Completely fixed? No. But when I read about NHL problems, payroll inequity among teams, competitive balance, revenue-sharing philosophy, and asset distribution within the league appear to be way down the list.

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The same thing needs to happen with Major League Baseball. Go away until you come back as close to fixed as possible. At least from a payroll system standpoint.

Oh, and free agency, salary arbitration and service-time manipulation. All of it. Get it all hammered out.

Forget arguments about a universal designated hitter, starting with runners on base in extra innings and banning the shift. Those debates seem silly to have in the vacuum that exists right now. I’ll care about that kind of baseball minutia when I have reason to care about my hometown team again.

Because right now, the one that plays in my backyard doesn’t have a chance for any long-term success. The Pittsburgh Pirates have an owner in Bob Nutting who can’t spend enough to keep pace in the current uncapped system of baseball and seems content to spend as little as possible at the expense of rarely putting a winning product on the field anyway.

Nutting is not alone among his MLB ownership peers. He just is a prime example.

Then there is the players’ union that seems to think if it doesn’t walk away from the bargaining table winning on all fronts, it’s not worth playing at all. It’s also a group of players who thinks their popularity with the young fans is what it was in the pre-steroid testing era of the late 1990s.

The truth is an average 12-year-old would much rather be Mike Trout on a video game than ever bother watching him on television or asking their dad to buy them a ticket to see him play.

We’ve had numerous labor stoppages before. Fans have grown fatigued from watching them play out. We lost the World Series in 1994. There was saber-rattling many times over as collective bargaining agreements expired in 1997, 2003, 2006, 2011 and 2016, not to mention those sticky coronavirus negotiations.

Yet, every time baseball emerges with some sort of middle-of-the-road, half-measured, band-aid adjustments and tweaks.

And every year, teams like the Pirates seem to find themselves in a position where they can’t spend competitively with the big-market clubs and have minimal incentive to do so even if they wanted.

For fans of the Pirates and other mid- to small-market teams, these frequent labor “solutions” are actually a “worst of all cases” scenario. The problems aren’t significantly rectified, and the detachment from the sport for putting us through the emotional ringer of flirting with more labor discord is all the greater.

Personally, I’m rooting for the lockout. Even if it lasts all year. What’s the difference? What am I going to miss? Another 95- to 105-loss season on the North Shore? All Pirates fans keep hearing from the team — and parroting back on Twitter — is, “just wait until the next few draft classes come up in three to four more years. Then they’ll be good.”

OK. Then I guess it’s the fans in Greensboro, Bradenton and Altoona who are getting robbed. If that’s the case, in Pittsburgh, who cares if we are missing out on 2022?

There was a time when I would’ve been less jaded and said, “Well, even if the Pirates stink, at least the rest of the league is going to be playing. I’ll watch that.”

Not so much anymore. Erosion of faith in the hometown team can only be offset by enthusiasm for the league for so long. Now I’m at the point where I can’t divorce my anger for how the league has handled its affairs from my inherent love for the game itself.

So, stay away MLB. Come back when you’ve made real changes for the better. Then I’ll jump back on board as I did for hockey in 2005-06.

Between now and then, I noticed that PNC Park will be hosting Billy Joel, Metallica and the Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard/Poison Joan Jett Stadium Tour, all in the span of four days between Aug. 11-14.

That’ll be the most interest I’ve had in a weekend series at PNC Park since 2015.